Teaching Middle School ELA

Episode 386: Forget Spiraling Everything: The One Skill Your Students Actually Need Before Testing

• Caitlin Mitchell

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We trade cram-heavy test prep for a focused plan that teaches test literacy so students think clearly under pressure. You’ll learn how to coach two-part multiple choice, structure short answers with EBW, decode vocabulary in context, and spot direction and critical words that change meaning.

• why spiraling everything can backfire
• what test literacy is and why it matters
• two-part multiple choice feedback loop
• short answer structure using EBW
• vocabulary from context using cues
• direction words that define the task
• critical words that flip the question
• simple routines that lower stress
• resources to implement strategies fast

Test Prep Sweets Stations Activity: https://www.ebteacher.com/test-prep


SPEAKER_00:

Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Today's episode is about test prep, but not in the way that it's usually talked about. Every time this time of year comes around, I see teachers start just like trying to cover everything. Like, let's go back to this, let's go back to that, like every standard, every question type, every type of passion structure, all of the things, right? We're just trying to incorporate as much as humanly possible before they go into testing. And I know that that comes from a good place, right? You want your students to be prepared. But I think what most teachers don't realize is that doing that often leaves students feeling super overwhelmed. It feels you feeling behind. It's an impossible standard, right? And the actual skill gap that's causing students to struggle on the test never actually gets addressed. So today I want to talk about the one skill that matters more than anything else before testing season begins. So it's not an activity today, it's not like a packet, it is a skill. And it's something that many students never explicitly learn. All right, let's dive into today's episode. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple: to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher Digital Planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs. And we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. So before I talk about the specific skill, I do want to address why I believe spiraling everything all the time can sometimes backfire. Now you know we believe in spiral review here at EB, but there is a nuance to this, right? If we're constantly doing more reading passages or more testing practice over and over and over again, but it's not landing for our students, right? We're trying to spiral this in, but it's not landing. We should certainly make adjustments, right? Like we need to adjust and adapt and be flexible. And most students don't really struggle on the state test because they don't know the content per se. A lot of the times they struggle because they don't understand how testing works, right? They misread questions or they rush or they don't care. They don't realize the question is actually asking them to do two different things. They don't know how to show what they know in a limited space, right? So what we do in order to prepare them that we think is helping is we add more content, more passages, more practice. And so essentially what we're doing is we're like increasing this cognitive load on our students, but we're not necessarily increasing clarity or understanding of actual tests themselves. And clarity is what students really need most as they head into testing season. And I think that this is why there are always gonna be some students who are just great test takers. They just understand how the test works. Their brain just understands how a test functions. And so that's a skill that we can teach to other students as well. And this didn't become apparent to me until I started actually teaching HSPT, uh the high school placement tests when I taught at Catholic schools in LA for the Catholic high schools from a book to prepare students for that specific test. And it was so interesting because I was like, oh, if we know these skills, it's gonna make the test so much easier for my students. And my students just crushed the HSPT, like across the board. It was absolutely incredible to see. And that one skill that my students actually needed to be taught was test literacy. And so the skill I want to focus on today in today's episode is exactly that test literacy. And this means that students understand how test questions are structured, what the question is actually asking them to do, how to respond strategically to a question. This is totally separate from reading level. It's totally separate from writing ability. And it's separate from how hardworking some of our students are, right? Those A plus students that bust their butt to get an A plus, but then they suck at the test. It's like when students lack test literacy, even our strongest students can underperform. So, how do we approach this with our students? Instead of spiraling everything and like trying to cram as much informational text in as possible before the test, what I want you to do instead is focus on teaching students how to think while they're taking the test, right? We're gonna focus on patterns that students see on tests, how to respond to those patterns intentionally. And so I'm gonna walk you through a bunch of different types of questions that you'll want to explicitly teach your students so that they can begin to obtain some foundations of test literacy, as well as two other things with direction words and critical words that are gonna be really important as students head into testing season. So the first type of question are two-part multiple choice questions. This is one of the more confusing question types for students when they get to state testing. So it's one of the ones that we want to call out and like bring attention to and teach them how to approach this type of question. And these are questions, obviously, that come in a set of two. In the first question, you determine the answer to a question about the passage. And in the next question, you identify the evidence that supports the answer. So, first of all, this is helpful if we're talking about the EBW approach as like a thinking framework. So if you've been doing EBW, you've been doing this anyways. But in this case of teaching our students about these types of questions, you want to let your students know the following tip to help them. So the challenge with these questions is that if you get the first answer wrong, then you're likely gonna get the second answer wrong too. However, there is a benefit to that type of question, right? If you can't find an option in the second question that supports your answer in the first question, that is a very strong hint that your first answer is probably wrong. So have students go back to the first question, read it carefully along with the other answer choices. Just this like simple little tip is something that many of our students, they don't even consider, right? Their brains don't even think like that. They don't even go there. It's not something that's in their skill set yet. And so for a lot of us, our especially as teachers and adults, right, our brains just make that connection. But for our students, it's not necessarily as apparent for them as it is for us. So simply pointing this out can be a huge benefit for them when they go to take the test. So that is just a little tip with two part multiple choice questions. Well, then the next type of question that's challenging for students are our short answer responses. And this is another place where students can really lose points unnecessarily. So a lot of students know something about the text, but they don't know how to organize their thinking under pressure. And so, what I want you to focus on are basic things that we talk about with EBW all the time, right? Answering the question directly, which is your claim, having a reason, which is your premise, evidence and justification. If we can focus on those four things for these short answer responses, students are going to crush it, right? We don't need over-the-top language. We won't need bombastic language in our writing. We don't need flowery figurative language necessarily, depending on what type of short answer responses we're being asked to do. But just clear thinking demonstrated in their writing. And that is where the EBW approach that I talk about all the time comes into play. Knowing that framework and having that consistent daily practice with claim, evidence, and justification are game changers for short answer responses on the test. And one thing that I want to say about this is I want you to go back and listen to my episode that aired at the beginning of January. It was called The First Writing Routine You Should Teach After Break. It aired January 6th. In that episode, I talk all about the EBW approach as a thinking framework and how to incorporate it every single day into your class period. That is gonna help you with this more than anything else. So short answer responses. Next thing, vocabulary and context. So vocabulary questions are often misunderstood. Students, a lot of the times, just default to, well, if I don't know the word, I can't answer the question, right? They see a word they don't know, they're like, meh, not gonna do it, can't do it. But most of our state tests are not necessarily asking for memorized definitions, right? They're asking our students to determine meaning based on context. So instead of guessing, we want to show our students how to reread the sentence and look at surrounding clues, how to eliminate answers that don't fit the tone or the meaning, right, of the sentence. And just teaching them how to do that, that's gonna build confidence because students will realize, oh, they don't need to know every single word in order to succeed. This is also where if you're an EB teacher, our word study program is gonna come into huge play in terms of supporting vocabulary and context on the test. So when students understand how these specifically types of test questions work, a few important things happen. We are giving them confidence. So when they have confidence, there's less stress, less pressure, and less panic. And they trust their thinking because we've taught them to understand what the test is asking them to do. And so reviewing these three types of questions with students in advance, quite frankly, like put these on posters around your classroom. It's just gonna give them a super simple edge when they head into testing season. So those are the three questions, types of questions. I want to talk about two different types of words that students are gonna see on the test too. And those are direction words and critical words. So this is one more piece of test literacy that again, I think is often overlooked, but it's also extremely powerful. And that is teaching our students to pay attention to direction words and critical words. Most students will read a test quick question really quickly, right? They'll latch on to a familiar word or a phrase that they understand, and then they answer based on what they think the question is asking, not what the question is actually asking. And that's not a content issue. That's a reading the question and understanding what the question is asking us issue. And direction words tell our students what kind of thinking the question is requiring. So they might come across words like analyze or summarize or infer or describe or compare support, right? Those words are not interchangeable, but students often treat them like they are because they just read the rest of the sentence and they're not paying attention to that direction word. So for example, a question that asks students to summarize is not the same as asking them to analyze. A question that asks them to support an idea is not asking for an opinion, right? It's asking for evidence. So when students don't understand the direction words, they might answer the question completely incorrectly, even if they do understand the content of what they read, right? So part of test literacy is teaching students these words to pay attention to them, underline them if they're allowed to while they're taking the test, and slow down and ask themselves, what is this question actually asking me to do? And when students recognize the direction word first, their response immediately becomes more focused and accurate because they're doing what the test is asking them to do, right? Um, last but not least are critical words. So critical words are a little bit trickier, and honestly, they're kind of even more important for students to pay attention to. And these are small words in a question that completely change the question's meaning. These are words like best or most or only or all, none, always, never. Right? Students often, again, gloss over these, they just read right past them. But one word like accept or not can flip the entire question around. So a student might again understand and comprehend the passage perfectly and still get the question wrong simply because they didn't notice one critical word. So instead of teaching students to rush, right, which I know that we're not trying to do, we want to teach them to really pause and like look for these types of words in the questions before they even look at the answer choices. And once students do that, it's very easy for them to eliminate wrong answers a lot faster. And once they can eliminate wrong answers, they feel more confident and they stop second-guessing themselves as much, right? So these are simple words that we can teach our students, hey, look out for these when you go to take the test. So this is why I consider direction words and critical words a core part of test literacy, right? These don't require more content. They don't require more passage reading, they don't require more drilling, right? They simply require attention and awareness. And when students learn to read test questions with that level of intention, their performance improves. Not because they necessarily learned more, but because they now are able to show what they actually know because they understand these words and how these words are used on tests. And I think it's so easy for us to forget that test taking in and of itself is a skill. And it's our job to help our students understand the nuance of the types of questions that they're gonna see on the test, as opposed to overwhelming them with passage after passage and practice after practice without these basic test taking skills being explicitly taught to them first. And that's why I would argue that this kind of test literacy is more valuable than trying to like all of a sudden spiral every single standard again in March. And that's why, you know, on our Suite Stations test prep activity that I talked about, I think last week on the podcast, um, let's see, it was episode 385 that aired last Tuesday on January 20th. Um, that that is passages, but it's passages that are focused on direction words and critical words and very specific types of questions and test taking skills for our students. So I'll include a link to that resource for you in the show notes too. If you want to grab it, it's 40% off. That's gonna be really helpful for you implementing a lot of the things that I talked about on today's episode in a fun way to teach these concepts to our students because they need to know them. And look, the reality is at the end of the day, the test happens. There's nothing we can do about it, right? And so let's find a way to put intention around how we are talking about test prep in our classroom, how we are talking about the test to our students in our classroom, and how we're just gonna make the most of it because it's something that we have to do. And let's just equip our students with test literacy skills so that they go in feeling some semblance of confidence. Because again, a lot of times, sometimes our smartest students epically fail at tests because it's just asking them to operate and think differently in a very nuanced way that it once we call attention to and bring awareness to, it makes taking a test a heck of a lot easier. All right, teachers, thank you so much for joining me this week on the podcast. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes. And I will see you guys next week on the podcast. February, we're getting into some grammar games. We're talking about a virtual field trip. I'm gonna share my Friday whiteboard planning system that I absolutely love. That's coming out mid February, talking about informational text, all kinds of fun stuff coming up next month. All right, you guys, have a wonderful rest of your week, and I will see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everyone.